The tech Washington wants to curb is already on Caribbean roads
American export controls are aimed at slowing China’s technological rise. Yet from car batteries to artificial intelligence, Chinese technology is embedding itself in the world’s biggest companies, and in the Caribbean it is already moving people.
Washington has spent years trying to hold back China’s advance in sensitive technologies. The effort is running into a stubborn commercial reality: in the fields where China now leads, its technology is becoming difficult for global corporations to avoid, and some of the largest names in business are quietly building it into their products.
The examples are no longer marginal. Apple has turned to Alibaba and Baidu to supply the artificial intelligence behind its products inside China. Ford is using battery technology from CATL, the world’s largest maker of electric-vehicle cells, at a plant in Michigan reported to cost around 3.5 billion US dollars. Volkswagen is developing smart electric cars in China with the local firm XPeng. Stellantis, the group behind Jeep and Peugeot, is deepening a partnership with Leapmotor whose European joint venture was reported to have outsold Tesla in parts of Europe earlier this year.
The scale behind those deals is what makes them hard to reverse. Industry analysts estimate that Chinese carmakers accounted for close to 63 per cent of global electric-vehicle sales in 2025, and that Chinese manufacturers supply close to 70 per cent of the world’s electric-vehicle batteries. Kitty Fok, managing director of IDC China, said the change is structural rather than temporary. In electric-vehicle batteries, she said, “the structural shift is already complete”, and switching suppliers takes years of engineering and recertification rather than a single purchasing decision.
The limits of the curbs
The trend exposes the gap in American strategy. Export controls have been most effective against advanced semiconductors, where the United States and its allies hold the crucial chokepoints. They have done far less to slow China’s lead in batteries, solar panels, and mass-market electric vehicles, where capability spreads through ordinary commercial partnerships and supply chains rather than a handful of chip factories.
Washington has widened its response. In June the US Defense Department added a series of Chinese firms, including the carmakers BYD and Nio, the battery maker CALB, and the technology companies Alibaba and Baidu, to a list of businesses it says are linked to China’s military. Tariffs imposed in recent years, including duties of up to 100 per cent on Chinese electric vehicles entering the United States, sit alongside those measures. Supporters of the restrictions argue that dependence on Chinese suppliers in strategic sectors carries real risks, from data exposure to the leverage a dominant supplier can exert. Critics counter that shutting out the cheapest and most advanced technology raises costs and slows the shift away from fossil fuels. Both points can be true at once.
Closer to home
For the Caribbean, this is not a distant argument. The same Chinese firms named on American restriction lists are the ones putting clean transport on regional roads. Barbados runs the largest electric bus fleet in the Caribbean, made up of BYD vehicles that now account for the overwhelming majority of its public buses, part of a plan for carbon neutrality by 2030 that the government says will save millions of US dollars a year in diesel. Across Latin America and the Caribbean, the number of electric buses passed 10,000 this year, most of them supplied by Chinese makers such as BYD, Yutong and Foton. Jamaica has cut import duties on electric motorbikes, and Antigua and Barbuda has taken delivery of electric minibuses through a United Nations backed grant.
St Vincent and the Grenadines has a direct interest in where this leads. Like its neighbours, the country imports the fuel that powers much of its electricity and transport, a dependence that feeds straight into the fuel surcharges on household bills and the wider cost of living. Cheaper Chinese batteries, solar equipment and electric vehicles offer a plausible route to trimming that fuel bill and easing pressure on the public purse. The complication is that the most affordable path runs through companies Washington is actively working to restrict.
That is the bind small states now face. A procurement choice that looks purely practical, buying the electric bus or the battery system that costs least and works best, can place a country inside a contest between two great powers it has no part in. For St Vincent and the Grenadines, the sensible course is neither reflexive alignment with Washington nor uncritical embrace of Beijing, but clear-eyed procurement that weighs cost, reliability, servicing and data security on their own terms. The technology is arriving regardless. The task is to buy it wisely.
Sources: CNBC; IDC China; US Department of Defense (June 2026 designations); Barbados Ministry of Transport and Works; International Council on Clean Transportation; UN Environment Programme. Original analysis by Vincypowa News.